You can download mods that allow you to use ladder runewords in single player. I don't see why you shouldn't be allowed to, honestly, and I definitely would if I played SP, because those runewords are the best items in the game, it's stupid not to use them =/

Tbh, I don't think the OP will suffer too much from not having them. I doubt he's doing /player 8 anyway.

Not to mention that it takes a metric crapton of time to collect the really good words.

- Looks like they took him to some bolt hole in the Wounded Coast.
- I wonder if it's near the Injured Cliffs? Or the Limping Hills? Massive-Head-Trauma-Bay? No? Just me? *sigh* Forget I said anything.

Look at your later spells. Fireball gains +14% damage for each skill point you have in Firebolt (and in Meteor). Meteor gains 5% damage per skill point in Firebolt and Fireball. Hydra also gains a synergy from Firebolt.

Everything stacks, so if say you want to really max out Fireball and/or Meteor, you'd have 20 points in Fireball, 20 points in Meteor, and 20 points in Firebolt (as well as 20 points in Fire Mastery).

If it's a synergy to a skill you later will use, it might not necessarily be wasteful to put a few points into Firebolt before Fireball is available.

And if you care about crunching numbers, one thing about synergies is that it only counts actual invested skill points. Let's say you have 1 point in each of Firebolt, Fireball, Meteor, and Fire Mastery, and let's look at Fireball's damage.

Going from Arreat Summit (Blizzard's official site on the game, http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp), lv 1 Fireball deals 6-15 damage. Lv 1 Fire Mastery increases all fire damage by 30%. Since we have 1 point in Firebolt and 1 point in Meteor, it gains +28% damage, so now we have 6-15 * 1.30 * 1.28, or 9-24, rounded down (I thiiink it's rounded down).

But say you get a staff with +1 all skill levels. A lv 2 Fireball deals 14-24 base, and lv 2 Fire Mastery grants +37% fire damage. However, the synergy bonus isn't affected, still being +28%, so your Fireball is now 14-24 * 1.37 * 1.28, or 24-42.

I'm not sure if these specifics are important at the time, but oh well. =p

I'm not sure if these specifics are important at the time, but oh well. =p

Those are actually pretty reasonable.

If you want to confuse someone, try explaining about every secondary stat found on gear like Open Wounds, Crushing Blow, AR, FCR, FHR, FBR, IAS, PDR etc. And all the stuff that is displayed incorrectly in tooltips and the character screen =)
Like Venom not applying to Dragon Talon attacks for an Assassin, which it actually does, Tiger Strike displaying false percentages, so on and so forth.

D2 is one of the biggest noob-traps ever for someone who is attempting Hell, esp on players 8, due to how many holes and unexplained (or simply unmentioned) mechanics there are in the game.

For example charming stuff like: block chance goes down two thirds while running, but corresponds to the stat screen chance when walking, standing or attacking. Now I never saw that in the manual! ^^

Fortunately it doesn't matter too much for casual play.

Last edited by zealous; 2011-10-30 at 07:31 PM.

- Looks like they took him to some bolt hole in the Wounded Coast.
- I wonder if it's near the Injured Cliffs? Or the Limping Hills? Massive-Head-Trauma-Bay? No? Just me? *sigh* Forget I said anything.

Heh, yes.. there's a lot that's not really explained inside the game, and you'd pretty much have to look it up on a website.

Rune words and crafting items are pretty much the biggest offenders if you ask me, but yeah, a lot of things you mentioned aren't straight-forward either.

Aaanyway, onto Sorceress skills... again, I won't say exactly which skills to use. Virtually all spells lv 12 or higher are viable now anyway, which is good, so you can just pick a spell you like, from whatever tree, and build for it. Whether that be Meteor, Fireball, Hydra, Frozen Orb, Blizzard, Lightning, Chain Lightning, Nova, etc....

But again I might point out a few utility spells that you may have glanced over. Telekinesis and Teleport (in the Lightning tree) are must-haves, as is Static Field. Go ahead and read Static Field, reread it again, let it sink in, reread it once more, then realize that if you fight a boss without using Static Field, you are a bad sorceress. =p

It's not as broken as it once used to be, having limited effectiveness in Nightmare and Hell difficulties, but my point still stands.

Heh, yes.. there's a lot that's not really explained inside the game, and you'd pretty much have to look it up on a website.

Rune words and crafting items are pretty much the biggest offenders if you ask me, but yeah, a lot of things you mentioned aren't straight-forward either.

Aaanyway, onto Sorceress skills... again, I won't say exactly which skills to use. Virtually all spells lv 12 or higher are viable now anyway, which is good, so you can just pick a spell you like, from whatever tree, and build for it. Whether that be Meteor, Fireball, Hydra, Frozen Orb, Blizzard, Lightning, Chain Lightning, Nova, etc....

But again I might point out a few utility spells that you may have glanced over. Telekinesis and Teleport (in the Lightning tree) are must-haves, as is Static Field. Go ahead and read Static Field, reread it again, let it sink in, reread it once more, then realize that if you fight a boss without using Static Field, you are a bad sorceress. =p

It's not as broken as it once used to be, having limited effectiveness in Nightmare and Hell difficulties, but my point still stands.

Telekineses isn't really a must-have.

Teleport and Energy Shield is something you absolutely need for Hell or even the Barbarian Immortals fight on Nightmare.

Static Field is very good for trash, useless on bosses. I've always skipped it.

Last edited by zealous; 2011-10-30 at 07:39 PM.

- Looks like they took him to some bolt hole in the Wounded Coast.
- I wonder if it's near the Injured Cliffs? Or the Limping Hills? Massive-Head-Trauma-Bay? No? Just me? *sigh* Forget I said anything.

Tbh, I don't think the OP will suffer too much from not having them. I doubt he's doing /player 8 anyway.

Not to mention that it takes a metric crapton of time to collect the really good words.

Losing Insight is bad enough to make me want to mod the game to allow ladder items on SP.

Also, Tiger Strike displays properly, last I checked, it's just misleading because at face value it looks like it mods your total damage.

Don't ever waste points on ice shard for the frozen orb synergy, if you want to be an ice sorceress go blizzard instead, you'll do 18k a hit instead of 555, and while FO hits a lot faster, it still doesn't compare to Blizzard. FO is king of new sorceresses because it stands on its own as a crowd demolisher, you can solo most any boss with it, and you only need 40 points (FO/mastery) before you can put skills into armor, shield, warmth, or a secondary attack. Meteorb (20 in FO, meteor, fire mastery, fireball, rest into prereqs, firebolt, 1 into armor/cold mast, get teleport through enigma, don't use ES at all) is actually the best Sorceress build, in my opinion, it just requires extreme gear (15-20 all skills).

Ice sorceress is generally safest, does huge damage and a built in CC, with Infinity that most people will never get you can kill anything.
Since Infinity is usually not an option, lightning sorceress takes care of all the things Ice does not, including running many bosses in Hell that are covered in ice and fire immune minions (countess loves to be like this).
Fire does the most damage, but there are a ton of immunities past normal. Easily the best to level up with, but pretty much required to respec once in nightmare.

Some very good advice here, thanks. I am familiar with the game but didn't know about the runewords and how they can transform a grey socketed item into an uber one.

To hotkey abilities, you have to press X I think to bring up your skills menu, and hover over the abilities you want to hotkey and assign a number 1-9.

I went sorc too because its less gear dependent and kills quick. I would recommend going for blizzard/frost orb, and after you get to like level 30 subspec into chain lightning so you have 2 elements. There is an insanely OP ability called "static charge" or something in the lighnting tree which reduced enemy hp by 25% each time.....you can very easily get boss hp down to 25% or lower just by spamming it a few times.

Any other advice? Such as some useful horadric recipies for early in the game?

OK first thing: points in energy are wasted, the only build that uses energy is the Energy Shield/ Frozen Orb Sorc.

second, I recommend changing up the keybinds. F1-9 is kinda clunky, I change then to QWER ASDF ZXCV . I also change "Show all items" from tab to space bar because I would constantly minimize my game when looking at the mini map.

Barbs are gunna be pretty boring for the first 3/4ths of the game. Just pick a build and work on getting your gear together.

I could sit here and type pages of info, but it would be best for you to learn yourself. Check out the Amazon Basin for indepth (some are rather dated) guides and an awesome community.

Early game Horadric Cube recipes that are useful for a sorc? Hrm. The only ones that come to mind are 3 magic amulets => 1 ring or 3 magic rings => 1 amulet. The resulting item has a rather low item level (i.e. its potential mods will be much lower than a new ring/amulet that you could gamble or find from enemies your level), but if say your amulet really sucks and you have three rings that you don't need, might as well take your chances with that...

And mm.. I don't know if I want to sway anyone towards the build, but I'm going to say I agree with Lysah favouring a Meteor/Frozen Orb spec. I'd say Energy Shield is optional, and you will definitely want 1 point in Teleport if you don't have Enigma, but I agree with the rest. Fireball actually does great DPS, Meteor's fun and pretty good for AoE, and Frozen Orb is extremely effective given how few skill points need to be invested in it to make it good. And in the case that enemies are both fire and cold immune, having 1 point in Static Field at least cuts their life in half so that your merc can finish the rest.

If you want to specialize in two elements, you pretty much should always have Frozen Orb be one. It's kinda overpowered in that way. =p

Rune word: leaf looks good, imo, and from everyone's advice. Im now almost level 30 on my sorc, where do you get the said runes? Farmable? No clue. Anyway...
Thanks again guys, still learning the countless steps you need to switch spells in battle...its so confusing for nothing, I don't get why they just didnt implement an action bar. I mean seriously.

Have you done the second quest in Act 5 yet (freeing the Barbarians in the Frigid Highlands)? You get a Ral, Ort, and Tal when you hand that in, so that's the Ral part of Leaf.

Tir Runes should be very common... if you haven't simply seen one during your travels, your best bet would be to try running the Countess in the Black Marsh a couple times.

And have you smashed Mephisto's Soulstone at the Hellforge yet (Act 4 Quest 2)? That will give you one rune... though if you only get something as low as a Ral or Tir, I'm sorry. =p (Hope for rarer ones.)

In the case that you're playing with others, that quest will still only drop one Rune total.. ideally, for the most runes, you should disband the group, have one player complete the quest, then have one of the others create a new game and repeat, so that each player effectively gets one rune.

Hellforge is a free rune, hopefully good, ral/ort/tal are free runes too. Runes are "farmable," they drop off of everything with equal chances, so just go smash lots of stuff. Chaos sanctuary generally considered to be one of the best places to look for runes. Nightmare countess is the best source of runes up to Ko or so, after that it's killing monsters in hell difficulty, where you are right now I would say when you can kill nightmare level countess a lot. Should be able to get an insight, spirit, and rhyme pretty quickly, which will help a lot. By the way, download a mod that allows you to use ladder runewords =p

Static Field useless against bosses? Psh, if you want to take twice as long.. =p You should probably only have one point in it, though.

The HP decrease affects boss health? oO

I need to test this out...

- Looks like they took him to some bolt hole in the Wounded Coast.
- I wonder if it's near the Injured Cliffs? Or the Limping Hills? Massive-Head-Trauma-Bay? No? Just me? *sigh* Forget I said anything.

Yes, Static Field works on all bosses, not sure about the harder difficulties but def does on normal. If you play a sorc you should def get 1 pt in static field it is OP, you just get in melee range and spam it a few times and the boss will be at 25% hp in no time. Makes solo'ing a TON easier.

Thanks again guys, still learning the countless steps you need to switch spells in battle...its so confusing for nothing, I don't get why they just didnt implement an action bar. I mean seriously.

Setting up action bar is easy. When you are in game, press "S" to bring up the skill bar, hover over the spell and push "F1" or "F2", do that for each of your abilities and then you just have to push F1 or F2 to rotate between them.

Static Field works on anything that's not immune to lightning. However, in Nightmare it won't reduce enemies' health below 33%, and on Hell, not below 50%. So yeah, in Hell, the difference between a boss without Static and with Static is roughly twice as long. =p Lightning Resistance does affect Static, but still, unless you're chucking 30k Fireballs or something, Static will probably be your highest DPS.

However, the Crushing Blow mod found on some weapons has a similar effect that I don't think is restricted. (Crushing Blow removes 25% of current health on a nonboss enemy, 10% on a boss; half that if using a ranged weapon). Thus the highest DPS characters for killing Uber bosses quickly are ones with a very high Crushing Blow chance (possibly 100%) and very fast attack speeds (such as an Assassin spamming Dragon Talon or a Paladin with Zeal).

Thus the highest DPS characters for killing Uber bosses quickly are ones with a very high Crushing Blow chance (possibly 100%) and very fast attack speeds (such as an Assassin spamming Dragon Talon or a Paladin with Zeal).

My ladder character was actually a kicksin with 70%+ CB, Guillame's Face, Goreriders, all that stuff.

It's one of the best nuker builds in the game.

Never was a huge Sorc fan, so my knowledge on their mechanics is kind of limited. The only Sorc I ever played seriously was cold-specced. I abandoned her eventually because of the snooze-fest of spamming Blizzard over and over again on Baal runs.

- Looks like they took him to some bolt hole in the Wounded Coast.
- I wonder if it's near the Injured Cliffs? Or the Limping Hills? Massive-Head-Trauma-Bay? No? Just me? *sigh* Forget I said anything.